Inside Out
Straight Talk from a Gay Jock
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Mark Tewksbury is best known as a gold-medal-winning Olympic swimmer. His remarkable sixteen-year athletic career included three Olympic medals, numerous world records, and inductions into three major halls of fame: the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame, the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, and the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Although retired as an athlete, Tewksbury remains a highly respected public figure. He delivered prized swimming analysis for the CBC from the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, hosts the Discovery Channel's popular How It's Made show, and is Co-President of the first World Outgames, Montreal 2006.Tewksbury has spoken to millions as part of his eighteen-year speaking career and remains much in demand as an inspirational speaker to companies and organizations around the world. For his active humanitarianism, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Western Ontario in 2001, and in 2005 Tewksbury was awarded the International Person of the Year Award at Sao Paulo Pride in Brazil. He currently lives in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
For more on Mark Tewksbury, please visit www.MarkTewksbury.com
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In public, Mark Tewksbury has always credited the 1976 Olympics as a major inspiration for his becoming an Olympic champion swimmer, but in fact, it was wearing a towel-turban in imitation of his grandmother and swimming in her condo pool that first sparked his love of swimming. Intimate and endearing details such as these are what provide Tewksbury's story with relevance beyond the famous-athlete-fights-and-overcomes-his-personal-demons story. Granted, Tewksbury covers all the usual challenges faced by performance athletes-the sacrifices, the post-Olympic depression, the intense glare of the media spotlight-but it is his private sojourn as a gay man, from coming out of the closet to visiting his first gay bar ("it was like being in another world with fashionably dressed people drinking cocktails from martini glasses") to entering his first sexual relationship (an ongoing, three-way relationship with a male couple) that will resonate with the reader. Despite the "Gay Jock" subtitle, the book is accessible; Tewksbury comes with all the tics and quirks of your everyday gay man wrestling with his sexuality, and later, with the complexities of finding a partner and dating. A thoughtful, moving narrative that inspires as much as it entertains.
